by Anne Edwards
*Frederick Waymouth Gibbs, a Fellow of Trinity and a barrister. He was King Edward VII’s tutor 1849–1858, but they never got on.
†Princess Louise was now the Duchess of Fife. Her husband, formerly the Earl of Duff, became the Duke of Fife in 1899.
‡The Indian servants were dismissed six months later.
*It was installed as planned but was not completed until after King Edward’s death.
†Reginald Brett (1852–1930). 2nd Viscount Esher (1899), served in Parliament 1880–85 as a Liberal, Governor of Windsor Castle 1901–1930; he managed the Royal Household for 30 years. He also edited The Correspondence of Queen Victoria (1907) with A. C. Benson. His influence was exercised behind the scenes, and he was at least partway responsible for many reforms, especially in the Army. Secretary to H. M. Office of Works and as such enjoyed a close relationship with the Crown. He was a sensitive, talented man of letters and a former M.P., having stood for Penryn and Falmouth from 1880 to 1885, and was much respected by all members of the Royal Family. At various times, Queen Victoria had offered him, and he had refused, the Under-Secretaryship for the Colonies, the Under-Secretaryship for War, and the Governorship of Cape Colony. King Edward later offered him the Viceroyship of India, which he likewise refused. He considered himself first a historian, and his observations of the Royal Family made in his Journals are marvellously incisive and revealing. He was more than a historian, having great interest in things artistic, for at the time he began his long work on Queen Victoria’s letters, he was not only the Director of the Opera at Covent Garden, but Royal Trustee of the British Museum. He was also Lieutenant and Deputy Governor of Windsor Castle.
*Lord Esher, who had so successfully taken charge of Queen Victoria’s Jubilee, was also responsible for the Coronation plans.
†For many centuries the Koh-i-noor diamond was the largest diamond in the world, a “title” lost in 1907 when King Edward was presented a tremendous stone from which two stones were cut that exceeded the Koh-i-noor in size. The Koh-i-noor is now in the Crown Jewels.
*The full list of the Royal suite on the Ophir cruise was: Lord Wenlock, Head of Household; Sir Arthur Bigge, Private Secretary; Sir Donald MacKenzie Wallace, Assistant Secretary; Sir Charles Cust, Equerry; Major Derek Keppel, Equerry; Commander Godfrey-Fausett, A.D.C.; Major Bor, A.D.C.; Lord Crichton, A.D.C.; Duke of Roxburghe, A.D.C.; Colonel Byron of the Australian Artillery, A.D.C.; Sir John Anderson of the Colonial Office; Canon Dalton (Prince George’s former tutor), Chaplain; Chevalier de Martino, Marine Artist; Mr. Sidney Hall, Artist; Dr. A. Manby, Doctor-in-Attendance; Lady Mary Lygon, Lady-in-Waiting; Lady Katherine Coke, Lady-in-Waiting; Mrs. Derek Keppel, Lady-in-Waiting; Prince Alexander of Teck; Sir Arthur Lawley, Governor of Western Australia.
*Princess May’s four Ladies-in-Waiting were Lady Katharine Coke; Mabell, Countess Airlie; Lady Mary Lygon; and Lady Eva Dugdale.
TEN
The Edwardian age began in the wake of tremendous change. The British had lost their supremacy in foreign commerce. Unemployment was at a shocking high, bringing with it hunger and discontent. After a decade out of office, the Liberals now could look forward to their chance to satisfy the needs of the people. Upper-class life was far more cosmopolitan. But rich or poor, Tory or Liberal, all looked toward King Edward’s reign with great optimism, and the vital and progressive part of the nation heaved a sigh of relief. Many believed it had been England’s misfortune that Edward had not succeeded to the Throne ten years earlier. His greatest supporters were the youth of the country. Even his discarding of the name Albert gave assurance that he would do away with what the young regarded as the false morality, false behaviour, and false ideals of the Victorian era.
King Edward loved pomp, and Great Britain longed for pomp. The Boer War—the worst war England had suffered, with over a hundred thousand casualties and an army that was half-starved most of the time—ended on May 31, 1902. The nation wanted to forget, and the new King, attractive, displaying all that was impressive in British royalty, was about to give the people their first taste of coronation splendour in over sixty years.
The date was set for June 26. Wooden stands, barricades, flagpoles, and Venetian masts appeared on the main streets where the procession would pass, and as June approached, the city took on the atmosphere of a grand theatrical dress-rehearsal. With each new day, the Court Circular would print additional names of foreign royalties and deputations from the Empire arriving for the event. For Princess May, the daily rehearsals and unending amount of detail were tedious. As early as June 4, Lord Esher took the older children—David, Bertie, and Mary—to Westminster Abbey. The boys had been worked into a frenzy of excitement by Finch and their tutor, Mr. Hansell, and soon were very grubby from clambering over the dusty tombs. Mr. Hansell had been boning them up on English history, and David, quite zealously, told Lord Esher that the Duke of Buckingham had been a “wicked man.”
“Why?” Lord Esher inquired.
“Because he gave bad advice to Charles I,” the child replied.
Lord Esher wrote his son—who was to have charge of the two elder Royal Princes at the Coronation—“I think he [Prince David] must have been reading Dumas!” With some amusement, he also noted that the young boy possessed a slight trace of a cockney accent, picked up (and to remain with him his entire life) through his close association as a child with Lala Bill.
The rehearsals and preparations were extremely trying for the King, who was looking increasingly unwell. On June 23, he was found to be suffering from acute appendicitis. An operation was ordered by the Royal physician for the following day. The Coronation was indefinitely postponed. Fear spread throughout England that the King was critically ill, not surprisingly, for at this time such an operation was dangerous, and in the King’s case complicated by his age and girth. The day of the operation, June 24, the rumour was that the King was “sinking fast.”
Lady Mary Lygon, Lady-in-Waiting to Princess May at the time, wrote to a friend: “I have never felt anything like the physical and mental oppression of the day in London. It was hot and airless and muggy—the decorations flapped about in an ominous manner—gloom and consternation were in every face. The King’s age etc. is much against him—but he has a wonderful constitution which may carry him through ... I was very sorry for the Prince of Wales, for everything had to be decided by him; and besides his great devotion to his father—the feeling that at any moment he might find himself King of England must have hung like a horrible nightmare on him. He does not like responsibility and though he has aged much in the last eighteen months—one could wish for him another two or three years of respite and preparation.”
On that same day, Princess May wrote in her diary that she had broken down in tears with Helena Bricka and told her: “Oh I do pray that Uncle Wales may get well. George says he isn’t ready yet to reign.”
But the day following the King’s operation, Prince George found him “smoking a cigar & reading a paper. The doctors and nurses say they never saw such a wonderful man.” By June 28, the King was declared out of danger, and the coronation was rearranged for August 9.
Lord Esher recorded a curious incident that occurred on July 27, just twelve days before the coronation. As he tells it, he sat next to Prince George at dinner that night and the Prince mentioned a queer prophecy which he made Esher promise he would not repeat to the King, who was terribly superstitious. A clairvoyant had told Victoria, about forty years earlier, that she would have a long and glorious reign, the longest and most glorious of all the English sovereigns; that she would be succeeded by two kings who would have short reigns; and by a third whose name would be David, and whose reign would be as glorious as hers. “One of Prince Edward’s names is David!” Esher exclaimed, and then went on to say, “When Lady Water-ford was dying (she was a dear thing who died of cancer about 8 years ago) she sent for the Prince of Wales and implored him to call his then unborn child David, as she had some fad about restoring the Jews to the Holy City. To
humour her, he consented, and his newborn son was given the names of the four patron saints of England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales—i.e. George Andrew Patrick David!
“I don’t think the Prince of Wales is altogether free from superstition himself, but he is reconciled to a short reign. He would not, however, for worlds let the King hear the story,” Esher exclaimed.
At the same dinner Lord Esher notes, “One source of amusement was the fascination which the Queen exercised over the Bishop of Winchester, when she led him away so far from the paths of virtue, as to make him smoke a cigarette with her.”
The following day Lord Esher entertained Princess May and the old Grand Duchess of Mecklenburg-Strelitz (Princess May’s Aunt Augusta) for tea. “She is a funny old woman—full of rather spiteful wit—who remembers William IV better than Edward VII. The Princess was gentle and homely in a rather stately way, as she always is. Probably the effect of living with such a garçon eternel as the P of Wales.”
Lord Esher was entirely right. Prince George was a small boy where both his wife and mother were concerned, but there was another side to the Heir-Apparent which was seen most frequently by his children. At home Prince George was a strict father. According to his eldest son, “He had the Victorian’s sense of probity, moral responsibility, and love of domesticity. He believed in God, in the invincibility of the Royal Navy, and the essential rightness of whatever was British ... If through my family’s position my childhood was spared the mundane struggle that is the common lot, I nevertheless had my full share of discipline. For the concept of duty was drilled into me, and I never had the sense that the days belonged to me alone.”
Combined with his stern sense of duty, Prince George possessed “an almost fanatical sense of punctuality.” His days were organised with “railroad precision—even to the habit of a post-luncheon nap, a carryover from his watch-keeping days in the Navy.” He allotted himself exactly fifteen minutes, and without benefit of clock or alarm, he would awake at precisely the right moment.
Prince George treated his sons in a harsh, disciplinarian manner that suggested Naval duty, with the six- and eight-year-old boys in the position of Naval cadets and their father as their captain. In letters they called him Papa, but in private confrontation he was always Sir. David, in later years, could recall only one time in his childhood when his father ever embraced him—upon his return from the eight-month trip on the Ophir. Generally, the boys and their father shook hands; at most he gave the boys a perfunctory kiss on the cheek. No words were as disconcerting to the youngsters as a command that “His Royal Highness wishes to see you in the library.” And nothing could have been farther from the easy, happy confrontations with their grandfather only a few months before.
The library was “the seat of parental authority, the place of admonition and reproof.” The small, cheerless room with two windows opening upon the driveway was furnished sparingly with few books and a most conspicuous glass cabinet that housed just part of Prince George’s vast collection of shotguns. The two boys would file into the room, the elder first, and stand before their father’s desk in an “at ease” position. If during an interview they were so unfortunate as to stuff their hands into their pockets, Lala Bill was immediately summoned and ordered to sew up all the pockets on their suits, “a royal command which despite some inward reservations she did not dare to disobey.”
The greater part of paternal reprimands the boys received concerned their classes. Bertie, being a slow child, unable to concentrate, was most often brought to task. Highly strung, excitable, fidgety, sensitive, easily rebuffed, and prone to take his weaknesses and mistakes too seriously, he did not have the charm of his older brother. During his parents’ absence on the world tour, he had become quite attached to his grandfather, whom he truly adored. And, as the coronation approached, he felt rejected when the King had less and less time for his grandchildren. Bertie had been naturally left-handed, but in the fashion of the time, he was forced to write with his right hand. Psychiatry claims that this can affect a child’s speech. Whatever the cause, his stammer grew worse, and nothing was done to correct it. Therefore, his oral work was backward and he was in a state of near-panic before a French or German conversation class. Mr. Hansell would then report the boy, who—as his biographer, Sir John Wheeler-Bennett, says—“had difficulty enough in expressing himself in his own tongue let alone in a foreign language—to his father. There followed one of those summonses to the Library, where Bertie, his knees knocking together as he stood tongue-tied before his father, suffered bitter humiliation, anguish of spirit, self-pity, exhaustion and pure frustration.”
To make matters worse, there was the matter of Bertie’s knees. He did indeed suffer knock-knees, as did his father, who insisted that the doctors devise some method of correction for the boy’s legs so they would not be a source of embarrassment to him later in Naval uniform, as his had been to him. Dr. Laking devised a set of splints that Bertie had to wear for several hours during the day, and then sleep in at night. Wheeler-Bennett reports an occasion when the child pleaded so hard not to have the splints put on at night and wept so bitterly that Finch, whose duty it was to see that they were properly adjusted, relented and allowed him to sleep without them. “On this being reported to the Prince of Wales by Sir Francis Laking, Finch was sent for to the Library where, having heard his explanation, the Prince of Wales stood up and drawing his trousers tight against his legs, displayed his own knock-knees and said in a loud voice: ‘Look at me. If that boy grows up to look like this, it will be your fault.’”
With their mother, life was less severe, although she backed up her husband in all matters of discipline. Lady Airlie recalled Princess May saying: “I must always remember their father will one day be their King.” Both parents were constant in one theme—the idea that they and their children were not different from, or better than, other people—other people, of course, meaning the well-born. But this was difficult for the children to understand because in all relationships they could very well see that they were being treated differently—not only from other children, but from adults as well.
Princess May awoke early the morning of the coronation. Her gown was ready for her, and she was the first member of the Wales household dressed for the awesome occasion. Princess Mary Adelaide would have approved her daughter’s magnificent coronation gown made entirely by English workers of English goods. It was of ivory-white satin, richly embroidered in four shades of gold and lavishly trimmed in pearls. On the bodice was fastened a corsage of diamonds and pearls. Over this she wore robes of richest purple velvet, a superb ermine cape being attached to the gown with large bows of gold and pearls.
London had been unseasonably cold until that morning, when the sun miraculously came out. David and Bertie stood in their kilts, their hair slicked down, their sister giggling nervously in her sweet white frock beside them, when their mother, looking grander than they had ever imagined she could, issued them last instructions.
The Prince of Wales’s procession consisted of three carriages, preceded and followed by escorts of the Royal Horse Guards. The children had gone ahead in their own procession fifteen minutes earlier. The Abbey had been transformed into a great theatre. Galleries were built into almost every part of it; tiers of seats ascended on each side from the floor of the nave; vast platforms stood in the transepts over the statues of statesmen and the monuments to poets; and even near the altar there were pews and boxes for members of the Royal Family and visiting Royalties. The two young Princes stood with their mother in the Royal Box reserved for Princesses of the Blood Royal, their sister Mary with them. The spectacle was extraordinary for the children to see, but they were still so dazed from the sight of the vividly decorated stands in the streets, the large troop encampments in the parks, and the overwhelming cheering crowds that it was almost too much for them to take in.
At five minutes to twelve, the great officers of state took up their positions near the Throne. The Prime Minister,*
the Duke of Devonshire,† and their attendants entered first. Then came the Queen, her diamond tiara dazzling. The splendour of her attire brought small, muffled gasps. Her gown was of shimmering gold, veiled with tulle and encrusted with cabochon embroidery. The neckline was framed by a wide, upstanding Medici collar in silver and gold and diamonds. Despite the King’s request that her gown be British, the Queen had chosen a Parisian couturiere. Her voluminous purple robe with its long, sweeping train, all exquisitely embroidered, had been commissioned by Lady Curzon from some of India’s finest seamstresses.‡
To add to her grandeur, the Queen wore ropes of pearls and so many diamonds that she was reported as being “ablaze with light.” She gave her hand to the bishop on her left and advanced to the cries of the boys of Westminster School up in the south triforium, “Vivat Regina Alexandra!”
Then all eyes were riveted on King Edward as he entered with his brilliant procession to louder cries of “Vivat Rex Eduardus! Vivat! Vivat! Vivat!” He walked slowly and with some difficulty. At one point he paused and faltered, his hesitation due more to the weight and the dragging of his train than his weakened condition. His face was pale, his expression solemn. The service had been shortened in consideration of his recent illness. Two moving moments stood out in the ceremony. First, when the eighty-one-year-old Archbishop of Canterbury knelt in homage and remained, unable to rise. The King held out both his hands and helped him steady himself. The old man walked away with the aid of his fellow bishops. Second, when the Prince of Wales took off his coronet and, kneeling at the feet of his father and King, vowed, “I, George, Prince of Wales, do become your liege man of life and limb, and of earthly worship and faith and truth I will bear unto you, to live and die, against all manner of folks. So help me God.” Prince George then rose to his feet, touched the King’s Crown, and kissed the King’s left cheek as tradition demanded. To his surprise, the King drew his son back for an affectionate embrace, then broke away and shook his hands.
